For all you individuals who sit at work blasting your Pandora (News - Alert) music, you probably don’t realize it but there is actually a company doing the behind-the-scenes work so that Pandora can bring that music right to your desktop, and that magic happens because of a company named Gluster.

Gluster, a company that delivers an open storage software platform focused on simplifying the task of storing and managing the explosive growth of unstructured data, is responsible for helping Pandora, the leading personalized radio service, manage its rapidly growing data storage infrastructure. Pandora has deployed over 250 terabytes of Gluster storage to hold its vast music collection – a collection that reaches more than 75 million registered users in the United States and plays on more than 200 devices, including PCs, smartphones, the iPad and in-home connected devices.

“When a song becomes very popular, Pandora needs to scale out and distribute across a large number of servers; then when it’s not as popular Pandora needs to take it back down,” Gluster’s Vice President of Marketing John Kreisa told TMCnet at Cloud Expo East 2011 this Wednesday. “Our solution has the elasticity to serve up the file based on demand.”

Gluster has been making its dent in the cloud space for over five years, since its founders built a supercomputer and then determined that they needed a system to store the data. While the founders originally tried to market the supercomputer, it was the intrigue surrounding the data storage system that caught fire, according to Kreisa. Since then, Gluster has prided itself on providing “consistent fast performance for the storage layer,” Kreisa said. 

Since its inception, Gluster has added other big names, in addition to Pandora, to its resume. The company that prides itself on being “the fastest path to public and private cloud storage” has also seen its technology deployed in Box.net, Petroleum Geo Services, Stanford University and the National Heat Lung and Blood Institute.

“Gluster is for files and for many files and that can span any industry,” Kreisa said.

Gluster believes that storage should not only support the new computing environment (virtualized, multi-tenant, scale-on demand) but will inevitably end up looking more like it (open source, scale out, commoditized, and paid-for on a utility basis).

“We are disrupting the storage market,” Kreisa said, noting that Gluster does this by taking an open source approach, by being highly scalable and by providing architecture that speeds up processes.

“Our solution doesn’t have some traditional weak points that other servers have,” he added.

Gluster offers all the benefits needed from a cloud storage company for a third of the cost and three times faster than other companies, according to Kreisa.

So what does Gluster predict is in store for the cloud market in the coming months? A greater interest in private clouds. Individuals will be turning to private clouds as a way to “dip their toe into the cloud water,” Kreisa said.

Gluster, for one, is excited about the move toward private clouds.

“This is a trend that is great for us because a big component of that is storage,” Kreisa said. “There’s a tremendous amount of interest and we are really riding a key trend."

During Cloud Expo, Gluster also had the chance to talk with TMC's CEO Rich Tehrani (News - Alert). Click below to watch the interview.